Where do I begin?

[jets]

I am new to this forum and I done alot of reading from alot of different places and well - I think I will have to buy a straight jacket soon so I can maintain the sanity I have left. So here's my thing. I have decided that I am going to buy a Midway JAMMA cabinet in the best condition possible Vs cost. I also want to use the arcade monitor that comes with it and most midway (MK type) cabs have a 15khz H Sync rate. I also want to use MAME32 in winXP so I figure that the J-PAC is my best option. I can make a new CP and layout the buttons the way I like by replacing the original one. Maybe add the max number of buttons supported by the J-PAC. All that leaves is the monitor dilemma.

When I found this site I read about the new Video card that ultimarc will have available soon and want to find out as much as I can about it. For some reason searches on this site don't yeild results all that well for me. Is there WIP page for this card? Anyways, I have a few questions that maybe you may be able to shed some light on. I'd like to know if there is a specific type of motherboard that has to be used with it. Can we expect full-screen gaming with the new vid card? How will vertical games be displayed? I read in one place that the top/bottom may get chopped...true or false? When the J-PAC was made there were obviously Vid cards that supported the required refresh rates...any specific models you know of? What are the Pros and cons of going that route?

Any help or suggestions for my setup would be great. Thanks.

[mpm32]

You should direct your questions to the maker Andy at www.ultimarc.com    He'll probably answer you quicker that way.

[JLR2000]

I am new to this forum and I done alot of reading from alot of different places and well - I think I will have to buy a straight jacket soon so I can maintain the sanity I have left.

Welcome to the insanity.  I can try to answer some questions, but I will warn you the I will not be speaking from experience, but rather what I have heard or seen on this board or the www.ultimarc.com forums.

When I found this site I read about the new Video card that ultimarc will have available soon and want to find out as much as I can about it. For some reason searches on this site don't yeild results all that well for me. Is there WIP page for this card?

No, but Andy does give updates on his forums, enough people are interested that questions of progress come up semi-often.

Anyways, I have a few questions that maybe you may be able to shed some light on. I'd like to know if there is a specific type of motherboard that has to be used with it. Can we expect full-screen gaming with the new vid card?

Yes, I believe so.

How will vertical games be displayed? I read in one place that the top/bottom may get chopped...true or false?

Usually I believe Vertical games have the black bars on the sides.  I think sometimes the top or bottom can be slightly chopped, but I'm not sure this is a result of the video card.  I personally have not noticed this on my 27" TV, or on my vertically rotated 15" PC monitor.

When the J-PAC was made there were obviously Vid cards that supported the required refresh rates...any specific models you know of? What are the Pros and cons of going that route?

Only a couple of cards have been mentioned, some here have claimed success, but it seems elusive to most others.  I believe that special drivers are needed with those video cards and also in some cases people have used another 3rd party software to extend the video options of the card...I can't remember the name now, but search this forum for Windows on arcade monitors.

Any help or suggestions for my setup would be great. Thanks.

I hope that helps...again I'm speaking to information I've read posted here and at Ultimarc.com.  It's not firsthand knowledge so I can't verify.  Hopefully if I have mistated something or am outright wrong about something, other members of the forum will post corrections/modifications.

Good Luck and welcome to the madness.

[SONIC]

For windows on arcade-screens I can tell you that I'm running Win98 on a Hantarex Polo monitor (the 25" screens allready sitting in the Midway cabs with Killer Instinct on 'em) and I run this via a TNT2 card with 32 megs of video-ram. The TNT2 card though wants a elder Detonator-driver to be forced down in refresh-rates and so on... for elder drivers go to http://www.reactorcritical.com/ and grab the Detonator 40.71 for the TNT2.

When done that you need to get an app called "Powerstrip", which will let you set up a user-defined resolution on your graphic-card.
The setting I made for the Hantarex-monitor is 640x480 16 bit colour, and set it up to stream in 15 Khz as soon as it's in windows.

After that I took an ordinary rgb-cable (vga-vga), cut off the end that goes into the monitor, and put the wires from the cable onto the input-pins on the hantarex-monitor, and the other end of the vga-cable into the graphic-card.

Now I'm running mame32 on win98, and most games look pretty normal. There is some vertical games that looks a bit weird though, they looked squezed on the vertical line, while there is black borders in the sides, but I found out that if you uncheck "Set Aspect Ratio" in the mame-setings most of the vertical games will be very playable too, even though the black borders do not really disappear!

Best of luck with it